The 5 most common ecommerce mistakes to avoid

There are different types of common ecommerce mistakes you probably do.

Today’s article will focus on five of them. Two common ecommerce mistakes about management and 3 about conversion.

There is a frequently asked question, regarding conversion: “There are people visiting my website but they don’t become customers. Why don’t they buy anything?”

Well, is your conversion rate high or low?

You have people coming on your website but only a few of them make it to the shopping cart and even less actually make a purchase. Is this normal?

With one word – Yes.

Let’s take a closer look:

In general, for every 100 customers your website attracts, you shouldn’t expect more than 3 purchases. Every e-commerce store has its own variables: an e-store that sells honey usually has a bigger conversion rate to an e-car dealership.

But what if you manage to drive 1000 customers into your e-commerce store but only one, or none, is buying?

Do you make one of these ecommerce common mistakes?

Common mistake #1: Spending your time on things that you shouldn’t [pre-launch]

There is a bad habit that was proven to be a common trend – many ecommerce store owners realized they had been spending their on the wrong things during the setup of their ecommerce store.

They would spend too much time on trivial -or less important- tasks, like designing their logo when they should be taking care of their content.

Time allocation is important and it should look like this:

Common mistake #2: Doing everything yourself

In our digital days, each one of these activities is a different profession and you are in this tough spot where you have to fill in many of these positions. Hiring people costs money and money is not infinite, so you end up doing everything yourself to save money. And this is where many owners make this common mistake: they treat time as infinite.

If you want a logo for your business, you usually don’t enroll in a Photoshop webinar, spend 30 hours to learn the basics and then proceed to make your own logo. You can do that but it’s not very effective.

You should think in terms of value. Your time is limited so the question is, how can you make the most out of it?

You can begin with freelancers for the most troubling areas of your ecommerce store and build up from there.

Common mistake #3: Sending fewer emails than you should

Don’t be afraid to send often. Second, let’s talks numbers.

Omnisend analyzed the email campaigns of small and medium-sized businesses. This is how often its clients send emails per month:

As a rule of thumb, that the bigger the company, the more mails it sends.

And this is how often the audience opens the emails:

Lower open rates in general. So should you send more often or less often?

Remember, your ultimate goal is to get the most possible orders, not to have the highest CTR or open rate.

Take a look at the next slide.

What this practically means is that businesses got 5 order for each new mail campaign until the 19th. By sending more promotional emails, you create opportunities to sell more. While the mail frequency increases, CTR & CTOR go down but orders go up!

To improve your results – segment. By segmenting your audience you can send the right amount of emails to the right people. You should consider creating two different groups: one with your 20% of customers that buy more often from you and one with the rest 80% of the customers.

Be very giving to your first group and more conservative with your email frequency to the second.

Common mistake #4: Weak product description

When shopping for online a potential buyer can’t touch anything. They are left only with images and words. They should do all the work and all the convincing.

Customers have no other way of knowing what the products are all about, except for what they read and see. You have to help them and communicate the experience you deliver with any of your products.

a. Words

There is this chair. “How many things can you write about a chair?”

“A lot”, says the copywriter of Wayfair and writes this:

This description is not telling you about the product – it is selling you the product. Notice how he never mentioned ‘excellent product quality’, which is something you’d see in your standard furniture description.

b. Images

Product images should be clean and load fast. Your purpose is to have large, attractive images at small file sizes.

Common mistake #5: Not following the journey of your customer on your site

Use Hotjar (or a similar tool) to understand what your potential customers do on your website.

Heatmaps will give you the ability to see which part(s) of your ecommerce store customers interact the most with, as well as reveal to you through which device they are connected (desktop, mobile or tablet).

Recordings can give you real-time insight into how your visitors are navigating through your site.

There is also a Forms feature, where for each form you have, you can know exactly where and when your customers stop filling them.

In aggregate, it will possibly give you a good answer as to why your customers may not make a purchase. Is your delivery form so long that your customers grow impatient and make a cart abandonment? Does a particular page load forever, your customers get discouraged and close the tab or go to another page? You now can have all the answers.

Conclusion

Focus on what matters. Don’t be afraid to email often, it’s good for your business. Images and descriptions are crucial – get them right. And understand your visitors.

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